Digital Studios: It's the Economy, Stupid;George Lucas Sees Technology as a Wondrous Tool and a Cost-Cutter

By JAMES STERNGOLD

Published: December 25, 1995

NICASIO, Calif.—
When George Lucas began the movie industry's love affair with computer technology on his first "Star Wars" adventure in 1977, Hollywood seized on the notion that computers, like the Force, would eventually make just about anything possible.

Now, after a series of major technological improvements, the fully digital studio has finally arrived. But for Mr. Lucas and other technology experts, the new equipment is still not being used to its full potential: bringing visual wizardry to the silver screen while reducing Hollywood's bloated budgets.

Most of the big movie companies use digital technology either just for editing or to create dazzling but extremely expensive special effects.

In Mr. Lucas's view, the studios have missed the point. In his eyes, digital technology, by reducing the need to shoot on exotic locations, build expensive props and film certain scenes over and over, is a practical tool, a means of telling stories on as grand a scale as a director wants, but on a reasonable budget.

"They don't get it," Mr. Lucas said of the big studios. "They're about five years behind. I don't think they understand what I do here."

Sitting amid the Victorian charm and powerful technology of his Skywalker Ranch here, he added: "The idea is not creating the perfect environment. It's creating the illusion of one."

The promise of the new entertainment technology is no different than in Henry Ford's Detroit in the 1920's. Computers, Mr. Lucas said, can give assembly-line efficiency to the business of illusion and entertaining audiences.

What Mr. Lucas is suggesting, in short, is that Hollywood go back to the future. Mr. Lucas says the model on which the digital studio is based is essentially the model of the studio that created "Gone With the Wind."

Before World War II, movie companies usually filmed against the backdrop of ersatz reality created in backlots from painted mattes. In the 1960's, films were increasingly shot on location to create greater verisimilitude. A movie was no longer a series of optical tricks that created an image of Africa, but actual images of Africa. In the process, movies became extraordinarily expensive one-of-a-kind endeavors.

Computers may be bringing back the old days. But this time the scenery will come not from a set department filled with mattes of different landscapes, but from disks on which scenery of everything from European cities to Asian villages will be stored digitally. An actor gesticulating against a blue screen at a lot in Los Angeles will eventually become a young man shaking hands with President Kennedy. The next Tara might be an antebellum mansion kept on a laser disk file indexed under the heading "Plantations," and the next Atlanta (pulled from a file labeled "Cities: 19th Century") might burn in the cold light of digital flames.

Currently, the greatest use of digital technology is not at the big studios but at specialized production houses like Pixar, Digital Domain and Industrial Light and Magic, a unit of Mr. Lucas's privately held Lucas Digital.

No big studio today, for instance, could create the computer-generated dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park," which were created by Industrial Light and Magic about three years ago.

But Hollywood is catching up, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop in-house digital capabilities. For instance, Silicon Graphics, whose work stations are frequently a component in the digital studio, has seen the percentage of its revenue -- $1.6 billion in 1994 -- from the entertainment industry grow from 5 to 15 percent in the last five years.

"I think it will eventually become the way almost all movies are made," said Thomas Pollack, the vice chairman of MCA Inc. and a former head of MCA's Universal Pictures. "You will be able to create just about all your backgrounds on the computer."

The newest studio attempting to create both a real and digital backlot is Dreamworks SKG. It has hired some of the most experienced computer experts in Hollywood to build what will be one of the best digital studios around, and a big part of the expense will be not just generating images, but storing them.

"We're putting heavy emphasis on storing images so they can be re-used, like an old studio with a costume and set library," explained Rob C. Hummel, one of the people creating the Dreamworks digital studio. "That's a big part of what the technology is all about. The model is very old-fashioned."

For Mr. Lucas, the best proof of Hollywood's tardiness in understanding the technology was "Waterworld," the futuristic seaborne epic that reportedly cost nearly $200 million to make. He said the movie could have been filmed at about half the cost by using digital technology and manufacturing many of the elaborate battle scenes flawlessly on terra firma rather than aboard wind-tossed ships. And, he suggested, the digital version would have looked better.

"There is no aesthetic advantage whatsoever" in shooting an action movie on location anymore, Mr. Lucas said. "The issue is economics."